When we look at dogs, we see several thousand years of breeding at work. We see dachshunds, able to go down badger holes and fight underground wars. Huge elkhounds run down the prey they were bred to hunt. All the basic breeds were brought into existence by human beings who specialized in selective breeding. Selective breeding, to Catholic Fundamentalists, is a type of re-programming of God’s basic “Dog Program” to meet human needs. That’s the sort of thing that accomplishment-oriented humans do.
It is rare that people have been bred to serve their masters’ needs. It is true that some slave-breeding establishments in Virginia, in the decades before the Civil War, brought in a huge amount of cash for that state’s economy. It is equally true that European miners liked to hire short, strong people who could work in narrower tunnels that didn’t require extensive excavation to follow thin veins of valued minerals.
But, for the most part, people have not been intentionally “bred” to specialize in tasks. Doing so would be such a violation of “Original Decency” that people who would want to do so are overthrown by revolt before such plans can be taken too far.
When we look at one human being who works in an abortuary and at another who’s outside, pleading with women not to destroy the precious life within their wombs, are we seeing two different species of human-like beings or two different breeds of people?
One may profitably wonder if, in actual fact, the descent into evil separates the human being from the inhuman being, and is what divides the saved from the damned. As the human being falls more deeply into sin, the soul shrinks, then shrivels as it descends, finally disappearing altogether into the flames below. That progressive dehumanization goes so far that it is reflected in The Creation Program by the difference between the orangutan and the hyena.
